Maps of Meaning with Jordan Peterson

Part 17, There is no Ratchet

We now arrive at Chapter 4 of Maps of Meaning entitled "The Appearance of Anomaly: Challenge to the Shared Map." (If you're wanting to keep track, we're about halfway through the book.)

The word "anomaly" in the chapter title comes from Thomas Kuhn's famous theory regarding scientific revolutions. You might not know Thomas Kuhn, but his theory has changed how we think about all sorts of things. If you've ever heard the words "paradigm" or "paradigm shift" you've been introduced to Kuhn.

Kuhn's theory concerned scientific developments, and Peterson will apply it to cultural and moral developments. The basic idea is this. We begin with an overarching paradigm or shared worldview that organizes experience and makes life predictable. But from time to time we encounter an "anomaly," an observation or experience that doesn't fit within the prevailing paradigm. Though a location of confusion and disruption, if the anomaly is occasional and minor we can carry on as normal. But if the anomaly is large or persistent this can create stress upon the prevailing paradigm. If that stress grows dissatisfaction with the paradigm increases. This is the "crisis" phase. The crisis is resolved through a "paradigm shift," which is often experienced as a "revolutionary" moment where the old paradigm is replaced by a new paradigm.

Again, Kuhn's theory was developed to describe scientific progress, but the core of this ideas has proved to be widely applicable. We have shared, settled assumptions. Those assumptions get challenged from time to time. And if that challenge becomes significant, we might need to scrap our old assumptions to find a better way to look at the world. Life is filled with these revolutionary moments, paradigm shifts large and small. From how you see yourself, the world, politics, God, the Bible. We can all look back at moments where a "paradigm shift" occurred in our thinking.  

We also see similar dynamics at work in cognitive, moral, and personality development. The famous theories of Jean Piaget (cognitive development), Lawrence Kohlberg (moral development), and Erik Erikson (personality development) all use Kuhnian themes, where stages of cognitive, moral, or personality development go through crises as we advance on to the next stage where better functioning awaits.

Jordan Peterson is also using these Kuhnian ideas, but with a significant modification. And it's this modification that makes Peterson a conservative rather than progressive thinker.  

Recall from this series Peterson's argument. Our shared map of meaning, our cultural worldview, our paradigm, has been built up over evolutionary time. Our culture, through ritual, norms, narrative, myth, symbol, drama, and religious observance, encodes the social, psychic, and moral wisdom of the ages. And as noted in the last post, we each are born into this shared matrix of meaning. Our culture. This is our "paradigm."

As Peterson has argued, this paradigm is mostly operating at the unconscious, implicit level. Over time, however, as cognitive evolution progressed, we slowly began to make the paradigm explicit. We started telling stories to narrate our implicit lifeways, to explain ourselves to ourselves. The most important thing to note if you want to understand Jordan Peterson is that this is an entirely bottom-up process. Most of us, by contrast, assume religion is a top-down process. We look to heaven, God gives us a moral law, and we try to obey that law. Top-down. For Peterson, it's the exact opposite. We begin acting in adaptive ways. Those ways get into a cultural groove, which is passed down generation after generation. Later on, we begin to narrate this groove in stories and myths. Eventually, these myths become religions and are codified in laws and rules. The process is bottom-up. Simply:

Top-Down (Ten Commandments Imagination):

God ---> Law ---> Behavior

Bottom-Up (Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning):

Behavior --->  Myth ---> God ---> Law

So that's how the paradigm comes into existence. 

From here, the paradigm faces "anomalies," challenges that Peterson groups under the heading of strangeness: the Strange, the Stranger, and the Strange Idea. Something disruptive and unpredictable--something strange--challenges the status quo of the society. If the challenge is significant, a cultural crisis ensues. But for Peterson, and this is key, a crisis isn't experienced as a reliable opportunity for cultural progress.  With the anomaly, the Dragon of Chaos appears and the entire culture faces dissolution. This is the Petersonian twist to Kuhn's theory, the notion that cultures can dissolve.

For example, in Kuhn's theory a new finding in particle physics does pose a challenge to reigning quantum theories. There is a crisis here. But that crisis isn't the threat that the new discovery will throw us all back into the dark ages. Scientific progress has a ratchet. We don't back up, but keep moving forward with each new discovery. A crisis for a scientific theory doesn't threaten to burn the whole house down. All is advance, advance, advance.  

But with Peterson, there is no such thing as a cultural, moral or existential ratchet. Cultures can dissolve. The shared map of meaning can be torn up. We can go back to the dark ages. If not scientifically--Though we could blow ourselves up. Thank you, Mr. Putin.--we can back up morally, socially, politically, existentially, and spiritually. In fact, Peterson thinks that is precisely what has happened to the modern world. We've burned the map and find ourselves lost.

To be sure, Peterson does have a vision of cultural progress and development. In the moment of cultural crisis the "Revolutionary Hero" emerges. As Peterson says, "The revolutionary hero reorders the protective structures of society, when the emergence of an anomaly makes such reordering necessary." More about that to come. But the point to be urged today is that cultural crisis poses significant risk. And it's this risk that make Peterson a conservative thinker. The cultural wisdom of the ages cannot be discarded without the Dragon of Chaos reemerging. There is no ratchet. Things can fall apart.